So, yeah, it was easy to love the outside.
What she didn't understand, though, was that it was equally easy to love all that was underneath.
Right down to those fears and insecurities she had regarding her mom and men as a whole.
I respected those issues. As well as the fact that she needed to be able to get over them in her own time.
So I just waited it out.
Kept my feelings in.
It was no real hardship, to be honest.
I still got to be around her, still got to take walks with her, get food with her, even spend a few holidays together. New Years, the Fourth of July, anti-Valentine's day. Oh, and we can't forget Lockjaw's birthday. That was a whole thing in and of itself. Cakes were made. Presents were wrapped and chewed open. Songs were sung. Good times were had. It was more of a to-do than my birthdays.
I could tell just from her face even a few blocks away that something was off.
She sent us a smile, but it didn't come close to meeting her eyes. Her jaw was tight. Her shoulders seemed tense.
Something was up.
"Hot pretzel?" I asked, watching as she took a deep breath, trying to wiggle the heaviness out of her shoulders.
"Always," she agreed, giving me that forced smile again.
"What's going on?" I asked a few minutes later, having taken on Lock's leash so she had her hands free to pick apart her food like she always did. I wasn't sure I'd ever seen the woman actually bite into food meant to be bit into. She cut up her pizza and ate it with a fork.
"My mom," she started, letting it drop there. Sometimes, she needed it to be pried out of her. Especially when it came to her mother.
"Is she getting another divorce?" We'd kind of been figuring it would be coming. It wasn't that Dea would be heartbroken over it. Or that Marni wouldn't bounce back, find another husband. But there would be that horrible period where Marni would spiral, and Dea would feel like she needed to mother her mother, talk her off the ledge, go out and visit with her, leaving her depleted when she got back home.
"No. She... she cancelled on Christmas."
"She cancelled on you?" I asked, brows lowering.
"I know at this point that I shouldn't be surprised or disappointed..."
"You can be disappointed, Dea. You had all kinds of plans."
Twelve days of them, to be exact.
Dea did nothing by half.
If she was going to host someone for Christmas, she was going to do it up. I'd been with her, hearing her shriek like an early 00s girl seeing the Backstreet Boys in concert when she won the tickets she had been trying to get via social media for hours.
I had met Marni twice. By all accounts, she was a rather self-centered woman, but I still found it hard to believe that she would leave Dea hanging after she had come to her rescue after her jerk of a husband bailed on her without a second thought.
"What made her change her mind?"
"Donald is staying home after all."
Oh, Donald.
The guy that Dea once told me—while tequila tipsy on New Year's Eve—had grabbed her ass the day after he married her mother.
"Couldn't they both have come to spend the holiday with you?"
"That was exactly what I suggested!" she agreed, shoveling some more pretzel into her mouth. "But she said Donald wouldn't want to have to spend his holiday in my shoebox of an apartment."
In all fairness, it was a shoebox. But it was a warm, happy, comfortable shoebox. Even if it was a hovel, her daughter lived there. Which should have been enough reason to deal with the small bit of discomfort that came with sharing a small space with a couple of people. And one dog.
I knew I was spoiled, growing up with two happily married, loving parents who indulged me and my siblings with more affection and encouragement than we could process. It made it hard for me to understand the situation with Dea and Marni. It made me a lot less sympathetic to Marni's issues like Dea often was.
In the words of my mother, It stops being about you the second you decide to bring a child into your life. If you aren't ready for your life to no longer be about you, then you have no business having babies.
This was during a talk about safe sex that ended with a fishbowl of colorful condoms being placed in the bathroom my siblings and I shared, but the sentiment still applied.
Not only was Marni not ready to have a kid when she did, but she also never grew up enough to learn that lesson and give her daughter a proper upbringing.
My parents would have no use for Marni. Both working in obstetrics—my mother as an OBGYN and my father as a premier fertility doctor—they saw people every single day who were desperate to have babies, so they had a low tolerance for those who had them but didn't properly appreciate and care for them.